Squirrel, squirrel hunter, and shotgun

Today is 2nd July. My last post wast dated 3rd May. It's been practically two months since I last posted in this blog. In retrospect, I would blame it on my ISP (no specific name here; but if I tell you that I'm a Malaysian living in a very remote area where all the other newer internet service providers have not managed to extend their services to yet, you know which company I'm talking about).

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Of course, there was also the factor that I had been quite busy with my translation works in the past two months, on top of having started teaching again (once or twice a week) at a college where I used to work full-time for five years and a half. But it was because of the frequent internet service interruptions in May that made me drop my blogging habit.

It happened some time in the first week of May, if I'm not mistaken. My internet connection started having very frequent hiccups: I would get disconnected and reconnected again as frequent as every 5 minutes. It was annoying, to say the least, but we were not overly concerned about the problem, because our ISP is notorious for inefficiency and below-par services, and we thought it was some of their people tinkering with the lines somewhere, again.

But after a couple of days of "hiccups", my internet connection just "stopped breathing", and died. No amount of retries would get us connected, so we finally realized it was a major problem, and we called their service hotline.

Now, don't get me started on their service hotline. Sometimes it would take umpteen attempts before someone would answer your call, and even that would not have been possible without spending about 15 minutes on the line listening to a recorded trying-to-sound-sweet-but-not-succeeding voice telling me over and over again that "your call is important to us; all our service personnel are currently unavailable; you will be attended to shortly".

Right. I'm some pesky problems to be "attended to".

The guy who finally answered noted my problem, gave me a report number, and said that their local service team will look into my problem in a couple of days.

And then a couple of days went by with no sign of the local service team having any intention of gracing our small little remote fishing village with their revered presence.

So I called the service hotline again. "Your call is important to us..." I don't usually cuss, but I recall that I cussed a lot that day.

What transpired was another report, another report number, and another two days going by without a hint of the local service team being something real rather than imagined.

The third time I called the service hotline, I managed to get a hold of someone from the technical service team rather than the usual clueless operators. That fellow, who was quite nice, polite and patient - finally, a little credit to the ISP - gave me instructions on how to test whether there was something wrong with my modem (because, to be honest, my modem's age was pushing two years, and I was not totally sure it was not the modem giving me problem; but I needed to be sure, as it would be ridiculous to go buy a new modem every time you have a connection problem). After testing the modem according to his instructions, I found nothing amiss with the modem, so the fellow made another report (again!) and gave me the report number.

This time around, somebody finally showed up at my door step. And I was glad it was the actual service team from the company itself, and not the sub-contractors they engaged for cable installation. The lone technician who came to answer the distress call of this, uh, extremely frustrated guy (not a damsel) was also very polite - another credit to the ISP; at least most of their technical folks are nice and polite, as far as I know, unlike those folks manning the counters of their local service centre) - and he tested my phone line with a handheld tester he brought along (the precise reason I was glad it was the REAL service people from the company, because I'm sure their subcon people do not have such a handy tool).

After less than a minute of assessing the evidence and engaging in deliberation, the judge (the technician) and his jury (the handheld tester) came up with a verdict: the phone line was faulty. And the good technician told me he had a pretty good idea where that fault may be.

He told me that they had been aware for quite some time (close to a year, actually) that a certain section of the phone cable had been partially damaged, and they had been requesting (what? for close to a year?) that the state headquarters send a team to reinstall the cable (the huge ones, not the small ones handled by the subcon people), but so far no action had been taken (I almost fainted when I heard this).

And how exactly had the phone cable been damaged? According to the good technician (and I hope he was not messing with me with his quirky sense of humor), some local squirrel hunter had accidentally shot the phone cable with his shotgut (shotgun!!!) while hunting the pesky little rodents.

And that, my friend, was why my internet service was interrupted for nearly two weeks. (To the credit of the ISP, they fixed the phone cable within two days - not another year, thank God - of the good technician's visit.)

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EPILOGUE
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A week after the above incident, our internet service was down again. Another major one. This time, we called the abovementioned good technician directly (he was gracious enough to leave his number the last time), and he came around to find - again! - the integrity of the phone line being compromised. "Don't tell me it's another squirrel hunter taking another round of potshots at the phone cable," I said weakly. But he told me the problem was different this time. Apparently, he had spent half an hour surfing the internet by tapping directly into the local switchboard or something two or three kilometers from my house, to make sure their newly-installed main cable was working fine; so the fault must be at a certain point along this two or three kilometer stretch of cable. Despite his assuring me that this incident was different from the first, I could not help but recalled having seen the local squirrel community gleefully playing on the poles and cables along the road leading into our small little village, and I tried to recall if I have ever seen anyone in our village carrying a shotgun or hunting rifle.

The problem was fixed a few days later, after the subcon people came by to replace the phone cable leading into our house. It could have been fixed a little earlier, but that was not their fault, because we were not in the first time they came a calling.